The key document was on top. Unfortunately, it was maddeningly incomplete, either by incompetence or design.
The Tretiakov Collection had been discovered at 21:03 on December 22, 1996 in Vault C3-44777 by a Corporal Nehemiah Jacobs, a research assistant in the Army Documents Division. Corporal Jacobs had been attempting to locate a copy of a 1901 treaty between Germany and the Ottoman Turks, but what had led him to that particular vault wasn’t noted. Nor was it noted how he’d learned the name Tretiakov, or even how the paintings had been packed or labeled. He also didn’t mention other contents of the vault, assuming there had been any, or the name of the officer who had given him the assignment. Not surprisingly, he also didn’t say whether or not he had found the treaty.
Jacobs’s two-page report had been copied to three army departments and the assistant secretary of defense, but it was not even marked Confidential. In other words, his find had raised no alarms, sent no one into immediate motion. File and forget.
So what had happened to elevate it? And how had it been determined even what the Tretiakov Collection was? I checked the staple holding the two pages together but saw no evidence of an attachment that might have been removed.
Under Jacobs’s report was a folder containing a set of extraordinarily high-resolution photographs of the paintings. I knew from things I’d seen at Benny Joe’s that they were satellite imagery size, eighteen by twenty inches, and the detail was so precise that if I’d had an enlarged version, I would have been able to count individual brush strokes. Obviously, somebody had thought it necessary to bring in pros to do the documenting.
I stood and laid the photos side by side, then went down the line absorbing the details of each. The styles varied widely, but each was the work of a very talented person. Petr Stech’s Scourge out of the East was one of the most intriguing, and I was immediately impressed with Archer’s power of recollection. The only detail she’d omitted was a shield carried in the skeleton’s rein’s hand.
The last photograph, however, literally took my breath away. It was Orlov’s Offering of the Babushkas. No one, not even Vermeer, had ever drawn a finer line. Even in a photograph, Orlov’s hand reached out and touched you.
The scene was Moscow’s Red Square under a full moon. St. Basil’s Cathedral loomed to the left, and the Kremlin to the right, their haunting shadows giving the wide concourse the look of a brick-paved cavern. The windows in the Kremlin were dark, many were broken. At St. Basil’s, flames poured from the oblong apertures beneath the spires, and one dome had collapsed. On the street below, in the left foreground, prowled a pair of fierce-looking, yellow-eyed dogs, perhaps gone mad in the search for food.
The detail was so precise that the roughness of the buildings’ mortar seemed tactile and the broken glass sharp. But the real business of the painting was a throng of women, milling about the square. Each wore a different patterned babushka and carried in her arms the limp, dead body of a young man dressed in a Soviet prison uniform. Their burdens clutched tightly to their breasts, the women actually seemed to stagger under their weight. Further adding to the drama was that, like the women’s, each young man’s face was so flawlessly drawn that it was actually an exquisite tiny portrait.
I knew how many there were going to be, but I counted the women anyway. Twenty-two. Then something caught my eye, and I leaned closer. Tucked into the shirt pocket of all but one man was an artist’s brush. The one who did not have a brush was at the very front, and his bearer, unlike the other women, who were of obvious peasant stock, was tall and slender, her dress fashionable. Likewise, her scarf was a brightly patterned blue and not threadbare, and instead of boots, she wore high heels of the era. A crucifix dangled from her neck, catching a tiny ray of moonlight.
Her young prisoner wore dark-rimmed eyeglasses, his face very much her own. And his paintbrush was held between his fingers as he would have done in life. Almost certainly, this was Illya Orlov. And the others were the mothers and artists of the remaining twenty-one paintings.
Orlov had left a record…the only way he could. I felt a little sick inside and was surprised that a painting could have such an effect.
There was nothing else of major importance in the box. Certainly nothing to merit the drama Hood had evoked before he’d left the room. The formal repatriation request on Office of the President stationery and signed by Yeltsin was almost generic. No impassioned, dramatic language like one would expect for something so dear—or wordy in the extreme like everything else Russian. The only passage relating directly to the paintings stated that they no longer had any value as road maps, because Tretiakov’s notebook had been discovered among Zhuk’s effects, and the surviving items had been located and moved back to museums in 1946. And the attached descriptions of the paintings were sketchy at best. They didn’t even identify the artists.
The only thing that nagged at me was that Serbin had written a separate letter to the secretary of state, claiming that Russian researchers had been unable to locate any record of how and when the paintings had gotten out of Russia after they had been given to the American attaché. Why even say this? If it was even true, all these years later, who cared? More to the point, nothing could be less Russian than admitting ignorance.
I put everything but the file of photographs back into the box and busied myself looking at some of the other glass-protected exhibits until General Hood returned. When he saw me, he looked uneasy. “You’re a fast study,” he said.
“General, with all due respect, there isn’t anything there you couldn’t give to the New York Times. There aren’t even manifests for Major York’s trips. The Orlov was on the last flight, but what about the others? Was he carrying just one painting per trip or something else too? For that matter, did he ever carry a Tretiakov? You can’t tell from what you showed me. And the only provenance is that the Russians say they’re theirs and sort of wave at describing them. To paraphrase A. A. Abernathy, if somebody tried that on me, I’d call the FBI.”
“Who is A. A. Abernathy?”
“Not important. But I don’t believe you’re that sloppy around here, so it looks like this is some kind of exercise to cut off my banging around where you don’t want any banging.”
Hood’s face turned red, but he held his tongue, confirming my suspicion. While he was uncomfortable, I pressed. “Let me try it another way, General. Who verified the Russians?”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“The repatriation request. Take out the word painting and insert baling wire, it reads the same. There had to be a ministry or department or museum involved. But that letter is so nonspecific, it could have been created at Kinko’s. So who vetted it?”
I had to give the general his due. He went from salty to conspiratorial in a nanosecond. I was obviously now on ground he’d rehearsed for.
“Actually, it wasn’t an official-official, government request. It was sanctioned, of course. Yeltsin signed off, as you saw. But it was only a half dozen years after the Soviet collapse, and the country was still operating like a start-up. Feeling their way. Navigating icebergs in the dark. We were anxious to have them succeed at nation-building, so we did everything we could to help. When the paintings were returned, each was sent to a different museum. There were unveilings. Parties. Press. It might not sound like much now, but at that moment, the symbolism really mattered.”
“I’d like to speak with Nehemiah Jacobs. I’m sure he’s long gone from the army, so maybe your office can dig up his whereabouts.”
Hood didn’t even blink. “I’m sorry, but Corporal Jacobs was killed in a motorcycle accident.”
“When?”
“As I recall, a couple of months after he found the paintings. Hit by a truck on his way down to Norfolk.”
“Make that five bodies.”
Hood ignored me and picked up the file of photographs from the table. “You neglected to put this back.”
“That’s because I’m going to take it with me.”
“Why would I permit that?”
“For the same reason you’re going to send me copies of the repatriation request and Serbin’s letter to the secretary of state. Because Dr. York has earned the right to have her research completed and her paper published.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then when you stop at Starbucks tomorrow for the Post, you’re going to see your smiling face under a headline that reads, ‘United States Army Chief of Staff Under Investigation for Conspiracy to Commit Murder.’ And somewhere in the story, the reporter is going to have a quote from the Russian ambassador about the current state of ‘national heritage repatriation.’ What do you want to bet that’ll get you a couple of calls from the White House?”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Try me. Better yet, call Sergeant Dion Manarca of the LAPD. Mention there’s a picture of you standing next to a guy named Dante Bruzzi.”
“Dante Bruzzi?”
“Gaetano’s nephew. And real piece of shit with a record from here to the Med.” I neglected to mention he was dead.
“Why would that matter to me?” He was perspiring now, and making no move to hide it.
“Because Sergeant Manarca’s career is on the line, and ten minutes after he hears your name, he’s going to start screaming for a subpoena. People are dead, General. Probably more than I know about. And your fingerprints are on all the Monopoly pieces.”
An army staff car dropped us in the parking garage and sped away almost before we were out. Unlike the door-to-door service earlier, this time we had to take the elevator to our car. I was paying the attendant when Archer looked at me and burst out laughing. “Well, they did it with dignity, but they sure as hell threw us out of there in a hurry. What in God’s name happened?”
“I think he was pissed you disrespected Caravaggio.” I handed the file of photographs to her.
She took it and spent the trip back to the Watergate looking at them. When I parked, she said, “I don’t think I can describe how I feel, especially after looking at the Babushka painting.”
“That’s exactly what happened to me.”
I had the reception desk call the Watergate Hotel next door and arrange for us to use their indoor pool. The outdoor facility in the residential complex was too exposed.
After a swim, Archer opted for a massage and a facial, so I headed back to catch a nap. On the way, my phone rang. It was Eddie.
“Where are you?”
“Right now I’m over Omaha. Stopped in Boise for lunch and a blow job, but only came away with a bellyful of ribs.”
“My condolences. Who’s riding shotgun?”
“Jody Miller.”
I could hear a voice in the background. “Hi, Mr. Black.”
“I thought he was visiting Mom in Nevada,” I said.
“Hit the wall talking bunions. I found a deadheading Southwest pilot to sit right seat up to Reno. Now, you’ve got the regular crew.”
“Where’s your next stop?”
“Jody says he knows a couple of chicks down Texarkana way who live in a mansion one of them clipped from an ex-husband. If we’re gonna have a layover, I’d rather not do it in a Motel Six with a pizza.”
“I won’t ask about Mrs. Buffalo.”
“Hey, I’ve never been unfaithful while we were in the same town.”
“I think that’s in the Bible. Look, I should know tomorrow what I want you to do, but it could be sooner. So keep the line open. No matter what.”
“Right, boss. Hey, Jody, get on the horn and call that Arkansas cooze of yours. Tell ’em to pack in some Red Bull, we’re gonna go all night.”
I shook my head and hung up.
Before I lay down for the nap I’d promised myself, I called Jackie Benveniste. The answering machine came on, and remembering my visit, I waited through the message, then asked him to pick up. A few second later, he did.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said.
“No bother at all. Nance and I were just trying to cook something we saw on Iron Chef, but mostly we’ve been drinking beer and throwing the ingredients at each other.”
“I’ll make this short. What can you tell me about Konstantin Serbin?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “I presume you want more than the broad strokes.”
“I know he was an army officer who’s now a businessman and art collector. I’m interested in how he might have gotten hooked up with our friend the Hyena. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like they would run in the same circles.”
“Really? Why’s that?” said Jackie, seemingly amused.
“Well, for starters,” I said, “Bruzzi is a violent, professional criminal, and—”
Jackie interrupted. “And Serbin’s what? The Russian Billy Graham?”
“Sounds like you’re going to stick a needle in my logic.”
“No offense, but the colonel didn’t go from tanks to limousines because he had a nice smile and knew how to over-price steel. Every one of the so-called oligarchs got rich the same way—by putting a gun in somebody’s ear. To his credit, Serbin actually held his himself. Criminals at that level never stop being criminals. They’re just a lot more media savvy than most people give them credit for.”
“I’m listening.”
“You have a dog?” Jackie asked.
Strange question, I thought. “I grew up with six Gordon setters.”
“Pretty big, aren’t they?”
“Seventy-five pounds, give or take,” I answered.
“Okay, suppose you tried to put out a bowl of food. What would happen?”
“One bowl for six dogs?”
“One bowl,” he said.
“If I lived, I’d probably have to be hospitalized.”
Jackie chuckled. “Okay, let’s figure you survived, and they’ve eaten. Now you refill the bowl and try again.”
“Same thing.”
“And a third time?”
“They’d keep it up until I either ran out of food, or they died of old age. Get full, throw up and start over. Genetics.”
“That’s twenty-first-century journalism too. Editors used to say, ‘Get it first, but first get it right.’ Now, it’s, ‘We don’t give a rat’s fuck if you make it up. Just write it loud. And if you can squeeze in a celebrity, here’s a bonus.’ So the bowl moves around, and they all chase it.
“You’d be amazed how many timetables get advanced when the press gets busy with some white-hot piece of crap. I think there were two coups while they were burying Princess Di. And the really slick operators have learned to set out a bowl of perfumed cat shit and wait for the morons to get the scent. Then they get down to doing business in the dark. It’s like a fucking joke everybody’s in on but them.
“In Rome, it was my job to monitor criminal networks and relationships. Pay attention to how Thug A is affecting the orbit of Gang B. And you know who I ran into? Not just obvious assholes like Bruzzi. But Arab terrorists. Japanese tech thieves. Brazilian drug smugglers. Tanzanian gunrunners. Even an occasional Washington spy humping secrets. But there were also what we called ‘borderlines.’ Shady oil barons. Shipping tycoons. Private bankers. Nuke scientists.”
“And Russian steel magnates,” I added.
“And everybody doing business with everybody else. No lone wolves. No filter on who would deal with who. Need something? Pull up a chair, order a Campari and sit back. It’ll find you. The world’s shrunk for everybody, including the bad guys. But the Med isn’t unique. Carve out a landing strip in fucking Antarctica and leave it unattended. In six weeks, the exact same people will be doing business in snowshoes.” He stopped. “Sorry,” he said. “You hit a nerve. You got time for this?”
I not only had time, it was exactly what I wanted. “I do,” I said.
“Just a minute,” he said, and I heard him call out, “hey, Nance, screw the Food Network, we’ll order in and put on some Nat King Cole. And bring me another Sam Adams, would you, sweetie?” Then he was back. “Okay, where was I?”
“Getting rich selling snowshoes.”
He laughed, and I heard him take a swallow of beer. “Every now and then, I’d invite a reporter in to shoot the shit. A lot of the stuff I dealt with was classified, but some of it, all you had to do was go out to the airport and watch who got on and off. Shining a light on rats gets them moving around, and you learn things. So I was always trolling for press guys who were bright but lazy. Guys who would run what I gave them. Shadows, mostly, but if you looked close, there might be a picture.”
I thought of Manarca.
“There was this go-getter running the Rome desk for one of the New York papers. A Mississippi grad too, so I might have been grading on the curve. Donny McGuirk. Seemed to be busting his ass. Filed twice as many stories as his colleagues. So since I was about to retire anyway, I decided to open up the safe. Give Mr. McGuirk something that would put the world on notice that things weren’t as neat and tidy as they’d been led to believe. And for Donny, minimum guarantee, a fucking Pulitzer.”
There’s nothing I like better than a good story told by a good storyteller. And Jackie Benveniste was good.
He continued. “Got to go back to the beginning. August 2, 1990. My thirty-seventh birthday. Iraq invades Kuwait, and the Republican Guard unleashes an orgy of violence not seen since Himmler dropped by Warsaw. By week’s end, relatives of Saddam were carpooling over for a few days of rape and concentrated looting. But while the lower phyla pilfered BMWs and gold brocade furniture, Mr. Hussein’s personal goons were systematically dismantling the country’s infrastructure and sending it back to Baghdad. Mainframes, oil rigs, fire engines…they even went into hospitals and tore babies out of incubators.
“One of the items they came across was a Boeing 757/767 simulator. Since Iraq Air didn’t fly either plane, there was no immediate relevance, but hey, when a madman sends you to loot, you loot, and the simulator got packed up too. You with me?”
“Not completely, but keep talking.”
Jackie went on. “Well, a simulator isn’t a refrigerator. You don’t just plug it in. So Saddam sent word to start burning out Kuwaiti eyes until somebody gave up the technicians.”
“How long did it take?”
“Less than forty-eight hours. Two Boeing-schooled engineers and their boss, the senior training pilot for Kuwait Airways. Welcome to Mesopotamia. Hope you brought a change of clothes.”
“And you told this to McGuirk?”
“Oh, I did better than that. I showed him where the simulator went when it left Iraq. In March 2002. Twelve years after it was stolen and a full year before ‘Shock and Awe.’”
“Syria?” I guessed.
“Nope, and not Iran either. Al Jawf, Libya. A place nobody goes. Not just because Qaddafi would have you gang fucked by camels, but because it’s the end of the goddamn earth. And fifty weeks a year, you can bake a pie in the shade.”
Jackie stopped talking for a moment, and I tried to get a rope around my thoughts.
“Anything come to you?” he finally asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Rewind to 9/11. Two 767s, two 757s.”
“Bingo. What else?”
“The Kuwaiti techs would be dead, but the computer memory would be able to tell you what runs had been practiced. I’d also want to look for fingerprints. And DNA. A match with any 9/11 hijacker ends the war debate. Forever. So why haven’t we already gone in and gotten it? A Delta team could do that in their sleep.”
“Because Uncle Muammar lets us use his airspace for all kinds of shit that nobody wants public. Complicated world.”
I had to agree. “So what about McGuirk?”
“This is the best part,” said Jackie. “After I finish laying out the intelligence reports, radio intercepts and surveillance photographs of the simulator coming off a Libyan freighter in Benghazi—any one of which could get me life in Leavenworth—McGuirk looks at everything, then leans toward me and says, ‘You maybe got something in Barcelona? They’re having a real bad winter in New York, and my boss wants to catch some sun and get laid.’”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Who could fucking make that up?” he said. “And here’s the PS. A year later, McGuirk writes a book. Ready? Saddam, 9-11 and the Tooth Fairy.”
I shook my head. “First thing I’ve got to do is check with my London managers and make sure Mr. McGuirk doesn’t work for us.”
Jackie said, “Don’t worry, he doesn’t. Somebody put two rounds in the back of his head in a Tunis alley. Goddamn if I didn’t lift a toast. Probably another pissed-off source. But back to your original question. Konstantin Serbin. When the Soviet Union collapsed, no one was watching anything, especially not the museums. The rumor was that Serbin, then chief of internal security, just bellied up to the bar. Bruzzi was the middleman for the stuff that left the country.”
“And I don’t suppose any of it went where it might stand a chance of being repatriated,” I said.
“Museums don’t have a pot to piss in,” Jackie scoffed. “Plus they’ve got boards that sit around wringing their hands over provenance. Private collectors are where the action is. And a larger percentage of them than you’d expect don’t give a flying fuck where something came from. They’ve got no intention of selling, and they’re certainly not exhibiting. It’s about bragging rights.”
“Sooner or later, sellers become buyers. Any guesses what the colonel might be into?”
“The Afghan and Iraqi stuff was hot for a while, but it’s mostly gone. Serbin’s known mostly for paintings anyway. He has a standing offer of five hundred million for the Mona Lisa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“When it comes to thieves, you never know. Good advertising too. It guarantees he’s the first call for every major score.”
“And if you’re really ambitious, he’ll go a billion for Apelles’ The Calumny.”
Apelles again. But not the one Hood had. “I don’t know what that is.”
“No reason you should. It was done about 300 BC and probably didn’t survive. It shows a man being whispered to by two beautiful women—one in each ear. Ignorance and Suspicion.”
“No comment.”
“Me neither. Anything else?”
“Yeah, why did you retire? Seems like you’re exactly the kind of guy who should still be on the job.”
“Allen Dulles said that in case of war, the best thing we can hope for is that the State Department remains neutral. We left neutral behind a long time ago.”